Brendan Eich and the team behind the Brave web browser want to change the way advertisers, publishers and consumers connect.

Online advertising is broken, and broken in a way that's not just inefficient, but invasive of privacy and corrosive to the quality of the whole web experience. Ads dramatically increase data usage and load times—an investigation from the The New York Times in 2015 found that when loading the top 50 news sites more than half of all data transmitted came from ads—and the covert installation of ad trackers which record users' browsing preference across websites is an "alarmingly widespread" practice according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

These aspects may be widely disliked by content consumers, but we're also in something of a Faustian bargain with online advertising: Ad money is the economic driver that has enabled such a proliferation of online content at little or no cost to the audience, and that free content has been a good enough reason to tolerate ads so far.